It’s well established that this house is strongly in favor of working to defeat aging and helping to ensure a long, healthy life for everyone. So strongly in favor, in fact, that I personally have a hard time fathoming the counter-arguments. How anyone can see the suffering, loss, and death caused by aging and still judge it, on balance, to be a good thing is well beyond me.

But such people do exist, which is why I’m very glad that Aubrey de Grey and others like him are working to be popularizers for the idea that aging can be defeated and that such an accomplishment is one of the most important project in which human beings are currently engaged.

In the video above, Dr. de Grey takes a break from describing how he plans to defeat aging and spends an hour articulating some of the important reasons why and answering some of the more common objections. I strongly recommend the talk to skeptics and proponents of anti-aging research. The former might get some answers to their critiques, while the latter will get some good arguments to use next time they find themselves in conversation with a skeptic.

Context: A study of some of the most decorated bomb-disposal experts in the US discovered that, when they get to work on an explosive device, their heart-rate doesn’t just stay flat, it actually goes down.

“To throw another methodological monkey wrench in the works, it turns out that bomb-disposal operatives aren’t the only ones who experience a drop in heart rate when they get down to business. Relationship experts Neil Jacobson and John Gottman, authors of the popular book When Men Batter Women, have observed identical cardiovascular profiles in certain types of abusers, who, research has shown, actually become more relaxed when beating up their partners than when they’re lounging in an armchair with their eyes closed.” – Kevin Dutton, The Wisdom of Psycopaths

Work has kind exploded on me, as it does every fourth quarter. I’ve got big deadlines both tomorrow and a week from tomorrow, and then it’s the holiday season with all the craziness that entails for a retail company.

So posting will be light for probably the next few weeks, and definitely for another week and a half. In the meantime, here’s a track that you should just put on repeat until I resurface:

Your election results page is downright enraging. We here in Washington State have been mailing our votes in for weeks. Your site claims to be real time-ish, reporting results from districts as they are available.

Which makes it maddening for a data junky like myself that, as of 19:57 local time on Election Day, you still report 0% returns for every single item on every ballot.

Related: there needs to be a word for an artist that creates unusually sample-able music. Whatever that word is, it perfectly describes Imogen Heap. She’s a brilliant artist in her own right, but I’m constantly amazed and the amazing tracks made using samples of her stuff. It seems she can’t open her mouth or touch a keyboard without creating a perfect hook just begging for sampling.

Magic Blue Smoke

House Rules:

1.) Carry out your own dead.
2.) No opium smoking in the elevators.
3.) In Competitions, during gunfire or while bombs are falling, players may take cover without penalty for ceasing play.
4.) A player whose stroke is affected by the simultaneous explosion of a bomb may play another ball from the same place.
4a.) Penalty one stroke.
5.) Pilsner should be in Roman type, and begin with a capital.
6.) Keep Calm and Kill It with Fire.
7.) Spammers will be fed to the Crabipede.